Questions
by Elsa Hellenway
Summary: AU. "When did the music die?" was on the tip of her tongue, but she seals her lips. She opens her mouth to ask, "When did law and lies become more important than music and truth?" but closes it.


_一__._

"Sasuke-kun, why is the grass green?" Sakura asks, turning her quizzical stare away from the blue, blue skies in order to watch him.

He doesn't answer, instead raising a single eyebrow before returning to the essay he's supposed to be writing, his fingers posed over the keys of his laptop as he gathers his thoughts. It's a jumble of words thrown together to form a study of monetary components that work together in a business—they have no meaning, no soul, because he could really care less. Business isn't his passion; merely his future profession.

A frown tugs at the corners of Sakura's lips, and pushes herself up, sitting cross-legged. With her pointer finger, she decisively pokes Sasuke's bicep—he ignores her, so she pokes him again and again and again, until finally, he sighs and says, "The grass is green because all other colors are absorbed by the grass except for green, which is reflected."

"Huh," Sakura says with an exhalation of breath as she lies back down. "When I was little, I thought that God had painted every blade of grass different shades of green, so that each one would be unique. Like snowflakes."

Sasuke looks up once more from his half-finished paper skeptically. "You don't believe in God, Sakura."

She shrugs. "Maybe I did, once upon a time." He doesn't look convinced as she tilts her head sideways to survey his expression, so she says, "You're right, Sasuke-kun, I just made that up," and giggles.

_二__._

"Sasuke-kun, why is the earth round?"

Sasuke sighs. "That's just the way it is, Sakura." Today, he's studying for a mid-term he has next week—Sakura should be, too (in fact, officially, that's why she's in Sasuke's dorm room), but her laptop had been abandoned long ago for her sketch pad, a pencil, and a view of the city below Sasuke's fifth floor place of residence.

"But _why_?" she persists, tucking a lock of pink hair behind an ear.

"The earth is round because gravity pulls equally in all directions. If the earth were another shape, gravitational forces would bring the shape back into a sphere."

"Oh," Sakura responds, staring out over the city—as the rays of the sun dim, imitation, replacement lights flare to life, surrounding the city in a haze of fake-lighting, and one by one as Sakura watches, the stars go out.

_三__._

"Sasuke-kun, why does the sun rise in the east and set in the west?"

Sasuke rolls his eyes and sets down his coffee cup, before taking his pencil from behind his ear to scribble yet another line of yet another mind-numbingly boring essay. "Have you ever seen it do anything else, Sakura?"

"So you don't know?" Sakura prods innocently.

Sasuke doesn't stop writing as he says, "The sun appears to rise in the east, because the earth rotates to the east. Since the sun doesn't move, it seems like it comes from the east."

"So it doesn't really rise in the east, it just looks like it," Sakura clarifies, tracing over the Starbucks logo on her overpriced cup of coffee with a cheap ballpoint pen—it strikes her that this is as strange a juxtaposition as ever, and she almost points it out to Sasuke, until she realizes that he probably doesn't care.

Sasuke sounds vaguely annoyed—he's not really the patient type—as he says, "From your position on earth, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. If you were to leave this earth, than the sun would not really rise in the east."

She almost says, _But it's just an optical illusion, right_? just to get a rise out of him, but she barely refrains when she sees that he's refocused his attention where it should be—his paper, full of facts and figures that he doesn't really care about, all for a grade that he doesn't care about, in order to get a degree that he doesn't care about.

Some life, right?

But if that's the one he wants to live, so be it.

_四_.

"Sasuke-kun, why does it get dark at night?"

"The earth rotates so that the other side of the world is facing the sun, and the side that we're on is facing away," he answers, distracted as he tries to finish his taxes. Sakura's lie untouched in front of her as she instead favors counting stars—someone once told her, that if you were to count every star in the sky, you'd get a wish. She is at one thousand, six hundred and seventy-three.

"But the sun is a star, and since the universe is infinite, there's an infinite amount of stars, and they _all_ give off light. Light travels at a set time, so, eventually, the light from all the other stars would reach us, too, so it should never get dark. Why does it?"

"There are two theories: one says that the universe is constantly expanding, decreasing the amount of light that reaches us. The other says that the universe isn't infinitely old. If it were, the sky would always be light, because light from every point in the universe would have had time to travel to every other point. As far as anyone knows, there is no edge of the universe, but there is an edge of time. The finite age of the universe limits how much light we see."

He mumbles all this as he flips through his papers, and Sakura bites the side of her mouth, trying her best to come up with her next question, one that, hopefully, he won't be able to answer; one that, hopefully, will make him stop and _see_ her.

_五_.

"Sasuke-kun, why do clouds float?"

"Why wouldn't they?"

"They weigh a _ton_, Sasuke-kun—_literally_. Multiple tons."

Sasuke back to typing away on his laptop. "Clouds are made up of water droplets and ice crystals that are spread over a large area. Each are very small—about a micron, or one hundred thousandth of an inch, across. This allows warm air rising from the earth's surface keep them in the air, until the warm air cools and the water droplets condense into rain."

Sakura sighs dreamily. "It's been a lifelong dream to dance across the clouds…to fly and be free." With a few sweeps of her pencil, storm clouds appear on a piece of scrap paper.

"Clouds aren't substantial. You'd fall."

She fixes him with a sad stare and whispers, so quietly that he doesn't hear her over the clicking of his computer keys, "That's what happens when you reach for the stars, Sasuke-kun. But there's that moment, that wonderful, glorious moment, when you make it to the top, and suddenly, you see _everything_ that you can't see from the ground…so I always try, anyway."

_六_.

"Sasuke-kun, which is better…paper or plastic?"

"Isn't that a matter of opinion?"

"Maybe. What's your opinion?"

"I don't really care."

Sakura hums under her breath, a low _hmm_. Finally, she says, "I always get paper, so that I can paint dreams of girls with long, silver hair catching stars and putting them in jars to put on a shelf that goes on forever on it—a never-ending shelf of jar-caught stars that belongs to long, silver-haired girls from a dream on paper bags."

"That seems pointless."

Sakura shrugs a shoulder. "It's cheaper than canvas."

_All art is quite useless_, Oscar Wilde once said, and maybe it is, but one piece of mediocre art is better than a thousand lawyers.

_七_.

"Sasuke-kun…" Sakura starts, then stops.

A moment goes by, and the _tip tap_ of Sasuke's fingers across his keyboard halts. "What?"

_Why don't you play piano anymore?_ she almost asks, then stops herself. _When did the music die_? was on the tip of her tongue, but she seals her lips. She opens her mouth to ask, _When did law and lies become more important than music and truth?_ but closes it.

And, most of all, she wants to ask, _Why don't you see me anymore?_ but she doesn't.

Instead, she shrugs and says, "I forgot."

And maybe he has, too.


End file.
